24-Jan-2018

Welcome to Env Data & the R Language!!

About Me

  • My name is Enrique Lugardo Montaño
  • People also call me Tres, which is 3 in Spanish
  • Because I’m the 3rd "Henry"
  • I love dogs

… still me

I received a PhD in Geographical Sciences from the University of Maryland

  • so now it's …
  • Dr. Enrique L. Montaño
  • I am remote sensing & geographical scientist
  • I am currently a Mendenhall Fellow - Research Geographer at the USGS

… and now

Adjunct Professor
Environmental Science and Policy Department
George Mason University

  • This is my VERY first class

Why are we here?

  • To learn R of course!

But, what is R?

  • That's a silly question!
  • R is the 18th letter of the alphabet.

How do we know that?

Because I used a function to find it

match("R", LETTERS)
## [1] 18

So again, what is R

  • R is a computing language
  • It was born of the S language from Bell Labs in the 1970's
  • R became the open source version of S in the 1990's
  • It's well known for statistics
  • But, modern implementations have become a powerful, multi-purpose language

From the R-Project Webpage:

Many users think of R as a statistics system. We prefer to think of it of an environment within which statistical techniques are implemented. R can be extended (easily) via packages. There are about eight packages supplied with the R distribution and many more are available through the CRAN family of Internet sites covering a very wide range of modern statistics.

Why R?

  • R provides an integrated environment for data science
  • That means we can both process and visualize data in the same environment
  • R is powerful and is growing
  • There is a strong community around R
  • That means help is available
  • Most of all, I think R is approachable

About class

  • Participation
  • Ideas
  • Feedback
  • Data
  • Questions
  • This class is interactive, so your engagement will make it better!

Syllabus

One more sleepy dog before we move on…

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Communication

Let's get started!

Other Software/Websites